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It's no secret that food labels are sometimes uninformative if not outright deceptive. Products labelled as "natural" sometimes use genetically modified or artificial ingredients. Companies sometimes peddle health claims with little scientific backing. And sometimes, fruit drinks contain largely water and sugar with only a small amount of actual fruit juice. While many of these labels are permitted by the Food and Drug Administration, they may also be susceptible to lawsuits alleging misrepresentation by competitors.

In oral arguments yesterday, the Supreme Court tackled many of these issues in a dispute between POM Wonderful and . The Court's ruling may touch upon much more than the legal issues involved in the case, which largely concern statutory interpretation. It has the potential to redefine how businesses label a wide variety of products.

In a market dominated by apple, cranberry and orange juices, pomegranate juice was a virtual unknown ten years ago. That all changed when POM introduced a line of pomegranate-based drinks. Touted for its beneficial health effects, these drinks became wildly popular and soon attracted copycats from industry titans such as Ocean Spray and Coca-Cola.

In the past, POM aggressively pursued beverage-makers offering beverages with little pomegranate juice that piggybacked on the fruit's popularity it had largely developed with the introduction of its line of drinks. In one such action, a California jury rejected its false-advertising claims against Ocean Spray in 2011.

This time around, it sued Coca-Cola under the Lanham Act, which allows a company to sue competitors that misrepresent the nature of their products. "What's misleading consumers here is they have no way on God's green earth of telling that the total amount of blueberry and pomegranate juice in this product can be dispensed with a single eyedropper," declared POM's lawyer, Seth Waxman, during yesterday's oral arguments. "It amounts to a teaspoon in a half gallon." The Coca-Cola beverage under attack - called "Pomegranate Blueberry" - contained 0.3 percent pomegranate juice, 0.2 percent blueberry juice, and 99.4 percent apple juice.

Coca-Cola defended its label, claiming that the FDA's approval under the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act preempted POM's claims.

The legal question posed to the Supreme Court asked the judicial body to resolve the tension between these two pieces of legislation. "We have a circumstance here where we have two Federal statutes that cover the same subject matter that apply functionally the same standard to the same words on the same product label," explained Melissa Sherry on behalf of the Solicitor General's office to the justices.

The FDA developed a standard whereby companies could label a product based on its flavor rather than a standard focusing on the percentage of each juice in the drink. Coca-Cola's lawyer, Kathleen Sullivan, argued that this benchmark blocked POM's Lanham Act claim. Justice Anthony Kennedy took issue with her conclusion. "And if the statute works in the way you say it does and that Coca-Cola stands behind this label as being fair to consumers, then I think you have a very difficult case to make," he said. "I think it's relevant for us to ask whether people are cheated in buying this product."

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was also incredulous of Coca-Cola's argument. "But maybe the two acts are serving different purposes," she told Sullivan. "The law that you are relying on is supposed to be concerned with nutritional information and health claims, not a competitor is a competitor losing out because of the deception." Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. made a similar comment later in the arguments, explaining that a "label that fully complies with the FDA regulations" could also be "misleading on the entirely different question of commercial competition... that has nothing to do with health."